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Fast Eddie
Fast Eddie (Powerword: Gus Raley) is site founder, wiki dictator, and its most successful troll to date. He's marked by his inconsistent viewpoints, breaking of his own rules, his allegiance to money and advertising metrics over good style, and his total inability to work well with others.
If you feel like interacting with him outside of TV Tropes, his Wikipedo account can be found here.
Are you a current or former Troper that has more information on der Fuhrer? Then pledge allegiance to the United States of Encyclopedia Dramatica and tell us moar!
His crusade against negativity
One of Fast Eddie's unrealistic expectations is his desire to counter-act the excessive negativity of the internet by enforcing an overly positive tone and style on the users. As a result, he is very quick to ban people for saying anything that could be considered a prejudiced statement] and does not like such words as weeaboo because they are "derogatory specifically in a way that is against our cross-fandom". Despite his desire to make everything fluffy cakes and rainbows, the next biggest topic he brings up besides money is how much he hates the average user of the site and would enforce more draconian measures to weed out the bad apples if it weren't for advertising metrics.
He also [clears out and lock negative pages as he discovers them. Worst of all, he's extremely lazy about this and can't be arsed to rewrite anything, so pages he clears of examples will frequently still act as though they have them in the introduction. He also frequently breaks the formatting while deleting example sections on work pages. While he claims that he'll take requests to change locked articles, he typically just ignores everything unless it involves deleting even more swathes of text, which he is more than happy to do. Ironically, despite his willingness to mongle pages like Emo Teen for being whiny slams against characters people don't like, he's more than happy to leave the way worse Mary Sue pages open despite them also being whiny slams against characters people don't like. Double standard much?
His site management and coding fail
Fast Eddie is also very swift to silence any and all criticism of his actions or the wiki as a whole through judicious use of censorship and the banhammer. He deleted a checklist of tropes named after obscure characters, because instead of dealing with this abomination of fanwankery like a man, he pretends the problem doesn't exist. He also deletes threads about Encyclopedia Dramatica on sight even if they hadn't devolve into whining over being linked to Offended... yet. This is shown to be a kneejerk reaction on his part because even when a helpful poster suggested conflict resolution methods for ED, he still purged the whole thread not even four hours later. Can't let the underlings think there's anything but unrelenting evil on this site, can he? He also frequently deletes discussion pages for controversial locked pages, although those usually get spammed to hell and back during the first week after he takes the ball and goes home, so little of value is usually lost.
Eddie doesn't give a fuck about website security, storing passwords as plain text. Yet he is paranoid enough to ban whole fucking countries of Singapore, Pakistan and Puerto Rico since June 2011, because all those squint-eyed Azns and spics were apparently dirty spammers.
Fast Eddie's extreme penny pinching is his biggest motivation for everything. While he can't be bothered to spend longer than five seconds censoring the latest negative article and calls on the rest of the site to fix his fuck-ups, the threat of losing Google's mighty advertising sent him into a panic and motivated him to fix dozens of problems in only a few days. This same service is also why he'll block porn tropes as much as possible and demand quick renames of anything Google's server might interpret as smut. To see just how far he'll go to save precious moniez, take a look at this gem of a quote from the Lolicon discussion page:
—Fast Eddie cannot spare even 16 kilobytes of bandwidth for a "dead weight" article. That's 0.000001352 cents per visit if using Layered Tech pricing or 221,893,491 page views before he'll be denied a Big Mac. | ||
He also regularly deletes unused pictures from the server, purges old forum posts, and clears page histories older than a few months (which are already economized by only containing the changes as opposed to the full old versions like proper MediaWiki) just to save a couple precious megabytes of server space. Technically, this means any page with text cuntpasted from Wikipedia or other Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licensed sites is a violation of the terms of agreement once the part of the history crediting them gets cleared. He is, of course, confident nobody will ever bring up a LOLsuit over this and he's probably right. His site is also a total nightmare of Search Engine Optimization, leaving the deep-link unfriendly "/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/" URL structure in place because he has no faith in Google, Bing, or Yahoo bots to carry over Page Rank via 301 redirects and floods their results with useless pages because he can't be arsed to add a NoIndex tag to articles that haven't been written yet.
Fast Eddie's day job is as a computer programmer for a "major video game company" (more specifically as someone that "work[s] with DAGs for a living". Based on his IP address it is most likely either Human Head Studios or Raven Software. According to a TV Tropes moderator, he is "a contractor who works on NPC AI in games, generally as a team lead."), which explains why he does not liek game critics like Yahtzee. In fact, his bitter hate for Yahtzee in particular is so strong, that he regularly breaks his own cardinal rule about no complaining, just because he can.
—Fast Eddie, failing to pay attention to his own website. | ||
So remember, kids, if you just happen to be a middle-high profile Video Game Reviewer, make sure to give every game from Human Head Studios and Raven Software a negative review, because it ensures that Dear Leader goes through another ronery night where he cries himself to sleep.
The Man Behind The Monument To Autism
As said above, Fast Eddie's powerword is "Gus Raley", a name he claimed for one of sockpuppets (the other being an azn named Janitor).
However, it get far, far more pathetic from here if you follow the yellow brick trail of dox:
Exhibit A:The Reveal Of Fast Eddie's Sockpuppet's
The Goons discovered a glitch in the highly customized PmWiki software Eddie created that let ordinary users gain mod powers in the event of log out, and they discovered a sockpuppet detection tool created by him that revealed IP addresses used by other users, and voila, Janitor, Gus, and Fast Eddie all used the same IP addresses. Neither Janitor nor Gus have been heard from for an eternity, and Gus is supposed to be dead, but further digging revealed neither existed but as sockpuppets for Eddie himself
More digging revealed a fellow named Gus Raley on Google Plus+ bears a striking resemblance to Fast Eddie, and by striking resemblance, we mean that is the same fucking guy.
Links
- Search terms for Fast Eddie/Gus Raley On Google
- SA thread exposing Fast Eddie for who he really is
- Project After Forums with the dirt on Eddie from Something Awful
- Gus Raley's Google+ Profile
- Fast's Eddie's TV Tropes profile
Exhibit B:WHOIS Of Tv Tropes
A WHOIS search for Tv Tropes revealed that Tv Tropes was established in Rice Lake, Wisconsin (and not the Bahamas, as it was widely believed Fast Eddie was located), and the company "designsbygus" (which Fast Eddie claimed was a trademark of a failed business by the late "Gus") is also associated with the domain, which can also apply to FE's IRL name, further proving Gus=Eddie.
Oddly, the name on the WHOIS is "Gu Straley", which is obviously faked, since we already know it's Gus Raley, so it's highly unlikely that the information on the WHOIS information is a typo.
Interestingly, falsfied WHOIS information can be reported and investigated, so if anyone wanted to, they could submit a report for investigating the WHOIS for TV Tropes at:
Links
Exhibit C: Wisconsin LLC Records
Since Wisconsin has a registration of all businesses, and since Tv Tropes is an LLC (limited liability corporation), a simple check of the Wisconsin registration of "THE TV TROPES FOUNDATION LLC" corporate records reveals some more interesting info.
- Registered Agent Office
GUY J STRALEY 1898 12 1/2 AVENUE 7A CAMERON , WI 54822
Either a typo or, more likely, another false name, but we do know Fast Eddie once claimed Gus set up Tv Tropes and he continued it after Gus died, but since Gus is his sockpuppet, that means the information further down the registration page of no other known officers/directors of the LLC is indeed accurate.
Links
Exhibit D: His real world address
Based on all the information so far, the most likely address of Gus Raley IRL is:
1898 12 1/2 Ave, Barron, Wisconsin 54812
According to Google maps, this is basically a trailer park on the outskirts of town, and since Fast Eddie was assumed to be living in the Bahamas, this almost pathetically sad.
Links
Conclusion
Fast Eddie is really Gus Raley, an highly insecure, incredibly butthurt old man with a terrible talent for hiding himself, falsifying public records, and lying in general, who also happens to live in a trailer park on the outskirts of a town in Wisconsin.